ABSTRACT
There comes a time during the research process when researchers must face their data. Sometimes, it appears as if there is a mountain of them to deal with and researchers must choose how they will handle them. Researchers go about it in a variety of ways, some of which the authors describe in this chapter. When beginning qualitative data analysis, most qualitative researchers engage in some combination of the following phases: characterizing, cutting, coding, categorizing, converting and creating. In this chapter the authors present these phases and then suggest some ways of doing preliminary data analysis. The term ‘verbatim’, however, is a somewhat slippery one because, in reality, the process requires analysis and interpretation. Indeed, the goals of the research study and the philosophical and methodological assumptions of the researcher have implications for the form and content of transcripts, since different features of data will be of analytical interest.
